It is really sad that the civil service, including the police,has become highly politicised over the years to the extent that it no longer considers itself answerable to anyone in the country except to the sitting government. It gives a damn to the judiciary. It pays no heed to the people at large and it has scant or no respect for the law of the land.
The founder of the nation must be turning in his grave over what has become of the bureaucracy of the nation to which he had advised in unambiguous language that it has to be accountable only to the law of the land and nobody else.
The rot seems to set in the civil service from the early 1970s when those in power started weakening this institution by withdrawing the umbrella of constitutional guarantee of the government service which was available to the civil servants. The rules governing their service were amended thus making them virtually handmaiden of the sitting government. Small wonder the civil servants in order to remain on the right side of their political masters and to keep them in good humour carried out their fiats without caring whether they were legal or not. They were used as hired assassins by the powers that be with the result that before long the civil service lost its prestige in the public eye. Time was when the ICS or for that matter the CSP and the PCS used to occupy a pride of place in the country.
One wonders what is in store for the civil service in future. The ‘ cream’ of the country which once considered it as an honour to be a party of the civil service has stopped joining it because of a lot of political interference in its working with the result that qualitatively too its standard has fallen considerably.
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